Friday, January 18, 2019

This first season of the Russian television, Ekaterina, tells the story of Catherine the Great's arrival in Russia, trials and tribulations under the rule of the aging Elizabeth, and seizure of power. As a television show, the series is similar to The Tutors in its excitement, passionate love affairs, and political intrigues. Its leading ladies (especially the actress playing Elizabeth) are excellent actors. The theme sound is appropriately redolent of the Game of Thrones' soundtrack. As history, the series reminds us of that the awesome autocratic power of the post-Peter the Great Romanovs was somewhat tempered by Church authority and alternative claimants to the crown whose very existence could potentially inspire revolts. The series also reminds us on the complex diplomatic affairs of eighteenth century Russia. While capable of sending almost anyone to her dungeons, Elizabeth employed royal advisers, an expensive army, and a complex counter-espionage services to keep her royal prerogatives and her country's borders safe. As importantly, Elizabeth understandably worried about her heir. In fact, the dynastic succession was an almost overriding obsession for the empress. Who would follow her policies, continue the Romanov dynasty, or at least rule Russia competency after she died? The film depicts Catherine as intelligent and, increasingly, politically savvy. She learned Russian quickly and avoided political intrigue enough to stay alive. On the other hand, the film also suggests that Catherine craved love, and really did love both Saltykov and Orlov. In terms of its narrative power, the film does a wonderful job of depicting Peter III as a tragic hero. Flawed in terms of intellect, judgement, and (after a bout of smallpox) appearance, and capable of great personal cruelty toward Catherine, the film's Peter III nevertheless emerges as a complex and often sympathetic person. Suffering mightily throughout Elizabeth's reign, the often childish Peter III somehow mustered enough courage to periodically defy his aunt. He also demonstrated great musical talent, a capacity for love a woman of his own choosing, and some measure of courage when faced with a coup. He also tried to assert bold new policies for Russia, although these policies (especially those related to Lutheranism and the war against Prussia) were admittedly naive insofar as they flew in the face of popular Russian opinion.

Thursday, January 17, 2019

Andrei Makine is a masterful prose stylist. His Dreams of my Russian Summers was notable for lovely nostalgia and its beautiful if sometimes elliptical prose. Brief Loves That Live Forever is also both concerned with nostalgia and exquisitely written. Born in Siberia, but living in France and writing in French, Makine's greatest talent seems to be his ability to write very precisely about fairly vague (if nevertheless powerful) sensations, including love, longing, loss, bi-cultural understanding, and nostalgia. But Makine is also extremely adept at combining the personal with the political. In other words, he is able to describe how our personal lives are affected by the grand architecture of world-shattering events and global processes. But he does so in a way that never crowds out the essential elements of bildungsromans. In some ways, Makine could set his stories anywhere, but the Soviet leaders' megalomania sharpens the contrast between Big History and small (or personal) history, between revolution and everyday life, between Marxist philosophy and love, between politics and psychology, between great events and epiphanies.

Makine 's Brief Loves That Live Forever is a biographical story set in the late-Soviet era of Brezhnev. Sharply divided into various vignettes, the protagonist was raised as an orphan and ended up a dissident. Orphan-hood seems to be the appropriate symbol for both late Soviet citizens, who often suffered the loss of family members to the Gulag or other totalitarian horrors, as well as post-Soviet citizens, who suffered the lost of their country, the Soviet Union, as well as an economic system, political creed, and way of life. In the protagonist's memory, the October and May Day celebrations loom large. So too do propaganda, parades, Soviet heroes, leaders' portraits, edifying stories about Lenin and Stalin, and Soviet symbols. Makine mentions concrete facets of the Soviet experience, but dwells upon a generation's general feelings of disenchantment as young people in particular begin to realize that the Soviet dream of equality and cooperation is unrealistic if not outright ridiculous. It's an award place to be in. The failed dream remains an important part of one's past. The effect must be akin to finding out that Bill Cosby is a convicted mass rapist. We are obliged to hold two different versions of the world in our hearts at the same time, both the Cosby Show's depiction of a world of racial equality, and the accusers' reality of malevolence and rape. But of course post-Soviet citizens must deal with the two all-encompassing versions of the past.

Some favorite quotes from the book:

The Party had just proclaimed that communism would arrive within the marvelously brief span of twenty years.

Official propaganda congealed these dream visions together into tangible, simplified language, common to the country's whole population.

...this dress rehearsal for the messianic society.

"Well, what can you say?..He was a submariner, her man. And if they're lost at sea they don't get a grave, or a cross..."
The other one stopped scraping, leaned on the handle of her shovel, and sighed as well: "Well, as for a cross, you know...Maybe it's better there's no grave. She'll get over it quicker..."

Everything was provided for in the ideal society: enthusiastic work by the masses, incredible advances in science and technology, the conquest of space, taking man into unknown galaxies, material abundance and rational consumption, linked to radical changes of attitude. Everything, absolutely everything! Except...

Anyway he said she wasn't patriotic, you know. He divorced her.

The fatal mistake we make is looking for a paradise that endures.

This obsession with what lasts causes us to overlook many a fleeting paradise.

We would laugh when a book on our study program struck as too stupid (one somewhat visionary author declared that the completion of a five-year plan within four years would speed up time throughout the universe.)

And while I so longed to believe in this fraternal world, I knew that when you passed through our city's suburbs at night it was better to have a switchblade in your pocket.

Totalitarianism, even in the mild form our generation knew, dreaded the spectacle of two beings embracing and escaping its control.

Wednesday, January 16, 2019

Czechoslovakia, twelve years after Hungary. The time in Russia is clocked by her western periphery.

The pre-1917 generation surviving into the thirties was as defenseless as an old strain of microbes against a new antibiotic.

"Let us live. Everyone is unhappy. Before 1953 everyone was happy. Then it became safe to be unhappy, and everyone became unhappy."

"These are not quite freedoms. Rather leniencies.

"So many people are innocent, historically. They are happy. They live. Tell them you live in the Golden Horde. They will not even understand."

"For every paranoia there is a superparanoia."

There were no Sundays at that time because Sunday in Russian means Resurrection. So there were days off instead...

"We could live anywhere I liked, he said. Except of course, Russia, impossible to settle in, and we laughed at the horror of Russia. He was a comic figure from a comic country."

Why is it that in only in retrospect that life looks like life, and when you are within it, you can notice it no more than you can a cloud when you are within that cloud?

In 1921 capitalism, that worse evil on earth for the elimination of which almost anything had to be endured, was invited to save the country, and the worst evil on earth did save it...

"But then everything was the state."
The state. Masterdom. What a word in Russian: the adjective has fifteen letters--the very word is leviathan, its scales dully glimmering as it uncoils its five crustaceous syllables.

With the chief of the organs of state security Beria it was different: the whole organ was his harem.

The friend was a phony. But communism is so theatrical, contradictory, and deceptive that it is hard for a communist to detect phoniness in a friend.

Yet the retreat was over in 1928, the society began to be rewarded, supplied, and inspected from the center, and hence the farther off the center, the more pauperized, lawless, and savage life became.

Nikolay Nikolayevich was included to suicide. I do not say he had a suicidal mania, because he might have thought that it was trying to live that was a mania.

Living space has influenced all social relations, and there have been marriages of living space, living-space crimes, and struggles for inches of living space more fierce perhaps than for multi-billion fortunes, chains of casinos, or colonies promising gold, ivory and spaces.

"You not-yet-knifed bourjuy"

When grain was taken away from them entirely free, it was called procurement, grain-procurement, or grain-proc for short.

Now there were no bed sheets at all. We slept on rustling desk paper, but everyone who enters a greater degree of unfreedom in an infinite series of degrees of unfreedom must realize at once that he is in a new life, and no comparison with his former life is possible.

Unheard-of luck it was, because I was not born under Sagitarius, the archer--I was born under the organization of the country's first machine and tractor station on the shevchenko state farm, odessa region.

When Ulyanov-Lenin still lived in Smolny of Petrograd-Petersburg, he wanted to start the elevator there. But no stupendous exertion of his dialectical intellect could start it. Evidently to create a new society and a new man is easier than to start an elevator.

By virtue of his rank, Ulyanov-Lenin was the highest incarnation of self-sacrifice.

After 1917 the populace was his property.

There were portraits of great Lenin everywhere, but was this enough considering the greatness of his modesty?

The county unit of fewer than a million deaths simply ceased to exist after 1917.

Not to write, but just to say something which one was not authorized to say was now a crime.

In the last several weeks I've launched an assault on Leo Tolstoy's novel, Anna Karenina. So far, I'm only 200 or so pages in. I last read the book almost thirty years ago, and consequently remember almost nothing of my experience with the book. To support my reading, I viewed the Tom Stoppard movie adaption of the book. Starring Keira Knightly, the movie is competent but seems to suggest that Tolstoy's books don't really belong on the screen. With apologies to Greto Garbo, who starred in an early version of the book, no screen version can do justice to the internal debates that constitute so much of the novel's style and substance.

Stoppard's main innovation in this version of Anna Karenina is that he avoids any pretense of realism by relying on an overtly theatrical mise en scene. While there's nothing wrong with converting the book into a play, it often seems as if this technique is primarily employed to avoid the cost of staging large-scale scenes. As for the character of Anna Karenina, the new movie version seems to suggest that a lot of her power resides in her physical beauty. Certainly her lines don't suggest any undue curiosity about the complexity of her life journey. On the other hand, Jude Law is brilliant as Karnenin. He's dignified, reserved, proud, wounded, and cold--everything Tolstoy seemed to have meant him to be.

The book itself is going well. On the negative side, I sometimes wonder what makes the book so beloved. Unlike the grandeur of the Napoleonic context of War and Peace, Anna Karenina sometimes revolves around an almost intentionally ordinary adultery scandal. On the other hand, Tolstoy does demonstrate an uncanny ability to appreciate both the strengths and the weakness of all of his characters. As I move further through the novel, the villains seem less and less villainous, and the heroes seem less and less heroic. That is to say, while Vronsky is somewhat spoiled and immature, he's also capable of behaving with courage and gallantry. Conversely, while Count Karenin is awkward and off-putting, he exhibits many excellent qualities, including self-control. But even Kitty's scorned lover, Levin, turns out to be something less than the hero one expects him to be. He's hard-working, loyal, and romantic, but he also lacks many of the wonderful traits of his fun-loving and tactful friend, Prince "Stiva."

To be sure, I'll post again on Anna Karenina as I get deeper into the novel. But Gary Saul Morson's work of criticism, Anna Karenina in Our Time: Seeing More Wisely, suggests that my early impressions of the book are not entirely original. Morson argues that Tolstoy's genius lies in the fact that he often intentionally veers into long descriptions of mundane topics in order to make a philosophical point: that life isn't made up of a series of meaningful plot points. Reading 200 pages of Anna Karenina involves one in several narrative dead ends. For instance, there's no really compelling need for the reader to spend so much time on the details of a hunt, race, or ball. Morson maintains that Tolstoy's decision to spend time on these ostensible plot detours is intentional. He wants to depict life as it is, as a canvas filled out by as many blank or empty spaces as colorful ones. Of course, Tolstoy has the power to hold our attention even when he's depicting the quotidian details of life. This is why many people enjoy the society scenes in War and Peace as much as they do the description of the battle of Borodino. But Morson argues that we become really enthralled with Tolstoy's great works when the blank spots on the canvas convince us that we are finally seeing life "as it really is," with all its highs and lows, and all its detours and dead ends.

Tuesday, January 15, 2019

Russia has suffered experience despotic government for many generations. The upshot of this has been the effect despotism has had on moral thinking. Just as many American slave owners used their intimacy with tyranny to formulate powerful theories of freedom, so too have many Russians used their familiarity with oppression to articulate clear definitions of moral liberty. Custine, Herzen, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, and Nadezhda Mandelstam, are just a few of the Russia thinkers who helped Europe and the world at large to think more deeply about what a society should do to afford its members enjoy personal liberty of conscience.

Another often overlooked Russian moral thinker was Lev Navrozov, whose brilliant social critique of Soviet Russia is entitled The Education of Lev Navrozov. In this book, Navrozov, the translator, intellectual, and Russian exile, systematically attacks almost every aspect of the Soviet system, including its history, leadership, culture, and guiding political and economic theory. The book is a skillfully (even beautifully) written polemic masquerading as a memoir. Its satire is both biting and darkly comic. Often, his extended rants about particular aspects of Soviet society seem like William Burroughs' famously outrageous "routines" about American society, such as "Thankgiving" prose poem about the place genocide occupies in our country's founding myths.

Navrozov analysis of Russia is a pleasure to read. With his unmitigated confidence, and deep familiarity with elite Russian political and cultural society, he is perfectly positioned to wound or kill every single sacred cow of communist life. He asks us to believe, for instance, that the Soviet Union was least friendly to the very people it was allegedly created to help: the workers. Navrozov takes Soviet Russia to task on every level. Starting with Lenin, Navrozov has absolutely no sympathy for any aspect of Soviet society, which he perceives as uniformly hypocritical, inefficient, unequal, and oppressive. He attacks Soviet policies toward national minorities, antisemitism, food requisitions, policies that induced famine, inequality, attacks on Czechoslovakia and Poland, the gulag system, the absence of democratic processes, the use of torture and capital punishment in the criminal justice system, show trials, propaganda, the absence of a free press, housing shortages, the extraordinary powers of the secret police, the banning of allegedly subversive books, regulations that made employment tardiness a crime, the diminished aesthetics of Socialist Realism, and much, much more.

It is, of course, possible to argue that Navrozov overstates his case by asking us to believe that Lenin was only concerned with his own personal power. However, he backs up even his least provable claims with logical assertions and a mountain of evidence. Navrozov is perhaps the Soviet Union's most effective critic insofar as he avoids limiting his criticism to Stalin's purges, and other well-documented episodes of murder and mayhem. For Navrozov attacks the problem at his roots, arguing against even Marx's suppositions, and insisting that Stalin was chosen over Trotsky and Bukharin precisely because his colleagues perceived him to be the least likely to kill them. In other words, Navrozov not only denies that the Soviet Union suffered because it failed to honor Lenin's legacy. He argues that the Soviet Union might have been even worse if Lenin had lived. The theory cannot, of course, be proven. However, by the time one finishes The Education of Lev Navrozov this unusual counterfactual history seems as plausible as any other one is likely to encounter. Even more importantly, by the time one finished this book one has a new vocabulary for explaining Soviet oppression, and terms like "possession-power," "superparanoia," "superlandlords," "caste serfdom," "pseudo-tsar-god," "torture-death station" "mega-scale agent provocateurs," and "nascent global gangsters" makes sense.

Monday, January 14, 2019

He has four names at various times. A person's life is heterogeneous, so this could be seen as an advantage.

It melted before reaching the ground and brought joy to nobody.

Paupers can feed themselves: begging, after all, is their profession.

The horses and the donkey walked side by side, despite the difference in their strides: This was a matter of honor for the donkey.

Imagined her hair was a lake and the comb was a boat.

The brain is the body's tsar...

Religion

Christofer did not like heretics.

Arseny made the rounds of Zavelichye, keeping an eye on life's flow. He pelted demons with stones and conversed with angels.

Arsney tosses clods of mud at several venerable residents of Zapskovye. He can faultlessly discern small and large demons behind their backs. The residents are displeased.
There is consolation only in the fact, Arseny informs Ustina, that the demons are even more displeased.

During the dayes, God's servant Ustin laughs at the whole worlde, at nyghte he mourns the same worlde.

Mortality

What is death? asked Arseny.
Death is when people are silent and do not move.

The seventh decade of his years would end the next day and he had decided to ask Nikandr, the elder, what to do next.
In principle, replied the elder, I have nothing to tell you. Just this: live, O friend, close to the cemetery.

I saw only the dead.
For God, all are living.

We do not build marble crypts and we do not carve out names, for our cemeteries are granted the right to turn into forests and fields. Which is gratifying.

One might ask a young person, who is this Yeleazar? And he would not answer. And even old men only vaguely remember him because they remember indifferently, without love. But the Lord remembers with love and does not let any small detail slip his memory, thus He does not need his name.

It was clear to the old man that it was the living who should be feared. All the unpleasantries that had occurred in his life hitherto had certainly originated with them.

Death gave off the smell of an unwashed body and the inhumanity that causes horror to arise in the soul. The gravity that everything alive could feel. That made the trees outside the window lose their leaves before their time. And birds fall from the sky in horror.

Nikandr's temporary necrosis was a display of solidarity.

And they do not understand at all that the dead can be resurrected in no time at all.

It had been revealed to them that the elder's resolute spirit was in irreconcilable contradiction with the decrepitude of his body.

Suffering and grief are in his eyes: he thinks they are already going to bury him. He fears his pain will never pass, even in death.

The saints were not exactly moving or even speaking, but the silence and immobility of the dead were not absolute.

Does that mean you think the end of the world already exists, too?
Of course death of individual people exists, and is that not, really, a personal end of the world. In the long run, history over all is just a part of personal history.

A person is not born ready-made. He studies, analyzes his experience, and builds his personal history. He needs time for that.

I, Ambrogio, am very afraid that time might end. We are not ready for that, neither she nor I.
Nobody is ready for that, Ambrogio quietly said.

Confess to me. I will take your Confession to Jerusalem and, I do believe, your sins will turn to dust.
But that will happen only after my death. Will that really count for me?
I am telling you: the very existence of time is open to question. Maybe there simply is no after.

I do not like parting.
Life consists of partings, said Arseny.

It is hardest of all, O Arseny, to foresee the future of one's own life, and that is good. But of course I hoped to be saved. If not in this world, then in the next.

Why give birth for death? boyar Frol said to the servants of his house.
But everyone is born for death, the servants objected. We have yet to see other types.

This was inquired of Aristides the righteous: how many yeares is it good for a man to live? And Aristides answerd: untill he does understonde death is better than lyfe.

People are free, Ambrogio replied, but history is not free. As you say, there are so many intentions and actions that history cannot bring them all together, and only God can holde them all. I would even say that it is not people that are free but the individual person.

Russia

Christofer understood that fifty-four years was considerable for a country with a turbulent history.

And a Russian person is pious. He knows a holy fool should endure suffering so he goes ahead and sins to supply him with suffering.

A Russian person, after all, is not simply pious. Just in case, I can report to you that he is also senseless and merciless and anything he does can easily turn into mortal sin.

Determining the time the world would end seemed like an estimable pursuit to many, for people in Rus' loved large-scale tasks.

..the condition of your roads will not change; Basically, the history of your land will unscroll in a rather unusual way.

Lots of Russians are gloomy, said Ambrogio, sharing an observation.
It is the climate, nodded Arseny.

Russians are not as gloomy as you seemed to think, after all, Arseny told Ambrogio. Sometimes they are in a good mood. After a horde leaves, for example.

I heard you were talking about death, said the merchant. You Russians really love talking about death. And it distracts you from getting on with your lives.
Ambrigio shrugged.
So, do people just not die in Poland? asked Arseny.
The merchant Vladislav scratched the back of his head. There was a doubtful expression in his face.
Of course they die, but ever less and less frequently.

The expanses of the Russian land were curative: they were not yet boundless at the time, so they gave, rather than demanded, strength.

What kind of people are you? says the merchant Zygfryd. A person heals you, dedicates his whole life to you, and you torture him his whole life. And when he does, you tie a rope to his feet, drag him, and tears stream down your faces.
You have already been in our land for a year and eight months, answers blacksmith Averky, but have not understood a thing about it.
And do you yourselves understand it? asks Zygfryd.
Do we? The blacksmith mulls that over and looks at Zygfryd. Of course we, too, do not understand.

Time
Because there is no already where she is now. And there is no still. And there is no time, though there is God's eternal mercy, we trust in His mercy.

From then on, time definitely began moving differently for Arseny. More precisely, it simply stopped moving and remained idle. Arseny saw events taking place on earth but also noticed that events had, in some strange way, diverged from time. Sometimes events came one after another, just as before; sometimes they took a reverse order. Rarer still, events arrived in no order whatsoever, shamelessly muddling prescribed sequences. It refused to govern those sort of events.

And do you know, holy fool Foma asks Arseny, how many years have passed since you showed up here?
Arseny shrugs.
Well, you don't need to know that anyway, says holy fool Doma. Live outside time for now.
He is attempting to determine when the world will end and though I am not sure this is within his competence, attention to eschatology, even on its own, seems worthy of encouragement.

All history is, to a certain extent, a scroll in the Almighty's hands.

I think time is given to us by the grace of God so we will not get mixed up, because a person's consciousness cannot take in all events at once. We are locked up in time because of our weakness.

Time is likely a curse, for it did not exist in Heaven, O Arseny. The forefathers lived that long because a heavenly timelessness still glowed in their faces.

After a brief but heated argument, they came to the conclusion that the infiltrators should be hung. Further, the residents of Zara were not inclined to postpone the matter to a later date, since they were well aware that time is the arch-enemy of decisiveness.

Are those the same women who saw them off in Venice? asked Ambrogio.
Yes, they look like them, replied Arseny, but they are different women. Completely different. As it happens, I thought in Venice about how there is no repetition on this earth: only similarity exists.

A thought slwly rises toward him from the leaden depths: the ocean is mighty and he will never find Arseny. That he will find him only if he drowns. Only then would heave time to search.

Time was coming apart at the seams, like a wayfarer's traveling bag, and it was showing its contents to the wayfarer, who contemplated them as if for the first time.

Time no longer moves forward but goes around in circles because it teems with events that go around in circles.

There are events that resemble one another, continued the elder, but opposites are born from similarity.Space
In the most general sense, journeys confirmed to the world the continuity of the expanse, a concept that continued to evoke certain doubts.

And so, my love, am going to the very center of the earth. I am going to the point that is closest of all to Heaven.

Moving around within an expanse enriches our experience, the brother modestly said.
It compacts time, said Ambrogio, and makes it more spacious.

And do not become like your beloved Alexander who had a journey but had no goal. And do not be enamored of horizontal motion.
Then what should I be enamored of? asked Arsney.
Vertical motion, answered the elder, pointing above.

Eugene Vodolazkin's book, Laurus, is a beautifully conceived and gracefully executed novel about life in the middle ages. Primarily set in Russia, but with short excursions into Lithuania, Poland, Venice, and the Holy Land, Laurus recounts the life of a holy man on the cusp of sainthood. Although the plot would be darkly comic if set in the modern era, the book manages to depict medieval Russia on its own terms, and without so much as a hint of condescension.

The book offers a rich, almost anthropological vision of a strikingly different worldview from our own. In this world, men and women believe that God permeates almost every facet of the physical world. In fact, the physical world seems to be only one manifestation of God's magnificence. Reading Laura, one cannot help but think that Vodolozkin is offering a remedy to William James' famous paradox about religious studies outlined in the seminal Varieties of Religious Experience. According to James, neither theists nor atheists can fully understand religious life; theists lack the perspective required for understanding religious experience with any degree of objectivity, while atheists lack the sympathy required for bearing witness to its powerful emotive force.

Vololozkin offers a third way. He asks readers to follow the life of a deeply devout person embedded in a deeply religious culture. However, his description of this religious journey doesn't require supernatural phenomena to make sense. By immersing us so deeply in a waters of overlapping religious sentiments, Vodolozkin gives us a glimpse of a world enchanted by faith alone. In other words, Volozkin demonstrates men and women can be powerfully motivated by religious belief even if no god exists to alter the physical laws of the universe. In Laurus, characters believe in religious healing ceremonies, local pilgrimages, icons, treks to the Holy Land, and Holy Fools.

Vodolazkin describe a deeply religious society that probably existed across Europe during the Middle Ages. On the other hand, his vision of life in the Middle Ages seems quintessentially Russian insofar as his lead character's faith leads to a lifetime of almost masochistic suffering in the pursuit of religious ecstasy.

Laurus is also a meditation on the nature of time. The one mystical aspect of Laurus is the fact that one holy man is apparently able to foretell the future. His gift is murky, or imprecise, but he does seem to divine the fact that millions of Eastern Europeans will die in the Holocaust one day. However, the point here seems to be less about the reality of God and more about the nature of time. As the ancient philosopher, St. Augustine, argued, every age is equidistant to God.

In Laurus, Medieval men and women embrace a different concept of time than that of modern men and women. These Russians believed that the world was likely to come to an end in the near future. Historians of time such as Reinhart Koselleck have postulated that only modern men and women expect that the future will be different than the past and last indefinitely. Ironically, Laurus' depiction of Millenarian thinking resonates today. After all, post-modern men and women have come full circle: with the advent of nuclear bombs and greenhouse warming, we seem to believe, as our ancestors believed, than history will come to an end in the very near future.

My Blog List

About Me

The author studied European history at Georgetown University, McGill University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He completed his doctorate in management at the University of Maryland. He is currently the dean of arts and sciences at a community college in Illinois. Views expressed on the blog are his own. The author welcomes ideas for academic or creative collaboration.